


Amor Vincit Omnia

by OhAine



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Pining, Post-The Final Problem, Sherlolly - Freeform, mollock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-07
Packaged: 2018-10-16 03:37:15
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10562904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OhAine/pseuds/OhAine
Summary: If you love a thing you let it go, isn’t that what they say?2017 SAMFA winner (1st place) Best Hurt/Comfort (M-E rating).





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [satin_doll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/satin_doll/gifts).



> For the gorgeous Kat, because reasons.
> 
> With love and thanks to MaybeItsJustMyType for her help with early drafts, her friendship and constant support.
> 
> Inspired by Ben's infamous comment on the lesson of season 4. 
> 
> Unbeta'd, I own nothing but the typos. Be divine, forgive my errs.

oOo

 

**_Amor vincit omnia, et nos cedamus amori._ **

**_-Vergil_ **

_(Love conquers all things, so we too shall yield to love.)_

 

oOo

As they go, this isn’t the most disturbing murder scene he’s ever encountered. But something about the sight of a young woman, her small body lifeless and cold, wrapped in a too bright coat perturbs him. Under his skin discomfort prickles.

 

_So who loves you? I’m assuming it’s not a long list._

 

Sherlock stands frozen by the memory. He tries the deduction again only to find that the data is corrupt. There's a virus in the hard drive. 

 

_Unmarried, practical about death. Alone._

 

Any other day he’d push it away.

 

But.

 

He’s been on a case for days, little sleep, even less to eat and his body is frayed, shaking with exhaustion. The tension that has hummed like a current under his skin for weeks finds a physical form, the muscles in his back and neck turn to stone. Inside his veins ice water rushes to every extremity, numbing him from within.

 

It’s possible that he’s drowning.

 

The scene before him swims in and out of focus and the white noise gets louder and louder and louder. A single drop of salty-stinging sweat trickles in to his unblinking eye, and beneath his ribs hot ash fills his lungs and there’s No. Fucking. Air.

 

Even to himself he can admit that he simply can’t take anymore, because if he stays there for even one more second he’s not sure that he’ll be able to stop himself from screaming or crying, or both.

 

Suddenly, all he wants is to see Molly again, to know that she’s not locked in a wooden box, the minutes of her life counting down as part of some sick and twisted game.

 

So he runs to her.

 

Using a key she’d given him years ago, he lets himself in, strips his clothes off as he climbs the stairs to her bedroom, and crawls into bed beside her, naked. She stirs when he pulls the blanket around his bare shoulders, but doesn’t speak. On the left side of the bed she is warm, safe from harm. He doesn’t have to see her in the darkness to know she’s alright. Instead he listens as her chest rises and falls with deep and even breaths, each one feeling like a gift from the gods.

 

The transport has a memory.

 

At night, in the moments between wakefulness and sleep, his body remembers a time when the distance that now exists could be crossed with only an outstretched hand, always finding himself drawn to her heat.

 

Sometimes, just sometimes, when they’ve shared a bed, her fingers have touched the silver scars on his back as though to remind herself that he survived, that he came home. An old ritual, it gave comfort to them both. Which is why he thinks he’s dreaming of that when he feels her fingers brush over his bare back. She traces a path of swirls along the curve of his spine. When she finishes, she leaves her hand there, a solid weight against him.  

 

Bare skin to bare skin, he falls into a peaceful sleep.

 

oOo

The regular Tuesday appointment passes as it’s done for weeks: Ella taps out a soft, irregular beat on the empty page of her notebook and sighs, Sherlock sits in silence, as though osmosis will help him find the answers to the questions that keep him awake at night.

 

They’re at a stalemate, both leaving spaces for the other to speak, neither taking the bait. But the longer the silence goes on, the more uncomfortable she feels under his pale and piercing gaze.

 

“Did you mean it when you told Molly that you loved her?” the therapist finally asks, because someone has to break the stand-off and it isn’t going to be Sherlock.

 

Agitated, his lips are a thin white line. His fingers twitch looking for occupation, so he smooths his palms over tensed thighs, “I haven’t decided yet.”

 

“Being in love with someone, Sherlock, isn’t something you can decide. You either feel it or you don’t,” she tells him, kindly.

 

His shoulders sag into the overstuffed chair, “I care deeply for her, she’s my friend. And, alright _yes_ , I do love her. Whether what I feel means I’m _in_ love with her is less…clear to me.”

 

“Well, let me ask you this,” Ella schools her expression, keeps it meticulously blank, “you cared a great deal for Mary, she was the reason you first came to see me.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You loved her?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Romantically?”

 

Affronted: “Of course not.”

 

“You care for and love John?”

 

“Yes,” he admits with a childish eye-roll.

 

“Are you in love with him?”

 

Sherlock snorts. “Don’t be absurd.”

 

“So,” she leans forward, elbows resting on her knees, “you do know the difference between the love you feel for a friend and being _in_ love with one?”

 

There's only silence in response.

 

The low ticking of the watch he wears on his wrist counts out the rest of the session, his eyes fixed on the hideous pattern of the rug beneath his feet, because, it seems Sherlock Holmes, who’d outlive God trying to have the last word, has no answer for that.

 

oOo

 

“Is it alright if I stay?”

 

Sherlock stands on her doorstep, reams off some nonsense story about a case on her side of the city and not being able to get a cab at this late hour.

 

Molly grins, a wry little thing, stands to the side and ushers him in, going along with the pretence all the while knowing that he’s there because it’s the anniversary of her father’s death, and he doesn’t want her to be alone.

 

They talk until the early hours. Ridiculous distractions, ones that keep her mind off her Dad, are rolled out one after the other. Cross-legged on the floor they share chicken korma washed down with beer, while they pore over long forgotten, grisly cold cases and argue about the best way to dispose of a corpse if you’re a housebound, arthritic, 92 year old murderer. Even Cludo makes an appearance over the rancid cinnamon tea Molly brews, the one that makes Sherlock grimace in disgust.

 

After they’ve gone to bed and with his back turned to her, unable to sleep, he feels her near him. Her gentle hand makes the same pattern on his back as the last night he slept in her bed. It’s one he can’t quite decipher.

 

She’s so very close: he feels her breath ghost over his skin, the hairs on his arms stand on end and something flutters low in his belly. When she finishes her runic sketch, she lays her hand on his hip, fingers curling around his sharp bone, and bestows a light hot breathed kiss to the back of his neck, one that grazes his hairline causing a shiver to run down his spine. Molly whispers into the darkness, her head resting on the curve of his shoulder, “Thank you.”

 

With the heat of her body barely a hand’s breadth away, he feels something in his chest cave under the weight of her presence, he swallows around the words he wishes he could say.

 

oOo

 

He thinks about her, of course he does.

 

When he lies beside her, what he feels is warm and heady. Virgin emotions that almost burst through his skin at the merest scent of her, and he finds himself wondering could he allow a little, _a very little_ , of what he wants.

 

Curiosity pervades every cell in his body and mind. He desires her. He wants to kiss her, to know what her breath in his mouth would taste like, to know the sounds she would make as he holds the back of her neck and coaxes her lips open with his tongue.

 

Would she push him away? Or yield, making soft moans as he stroked the hollow at the base of her back?

 

If he laid his hand on the tip of her breast would she lean into his touch? And if he opened her blouse, would she guide his hand over the flat plain of her stomach to dip below the waistband of her skirt?

 

His heart pounds in his ears when he wonders if she would let him lie between her legs and accept his body into her own? Would she say _Stop_ or _Don’t stop_? Afterward would she hold him and want to be held? Perhaps allow him to stay, then allow him to keep on staying, until he has told her every secret that burns white hot in his heart, and promised that everything he has is hers.

 

So, yes, he thinks about her.

 

But then he thinks Molly Hooper would be a fool to allow him anywhere near her heart.

 

And whatever else she may be, Molly is no fool.

oOo

What she’s doing when she touches him, why she does it, her opaque motivation and purpose is a source of curiosity and frustration. He could ask, but he knows she’d never tell. For as much as their lives are entwined, there’s a distance between them. She’s never fully gotten over what he did to her: not only the phone call, but the lies and the callous disregard for her feelings have left wounds, ones that he’s casually inflicted on her for years. Something is broken between them, and hard as he may try, he simply isn’t equipped to fix it.

 

Molly’s scars aren’t silvered with age. They’re raw and unhealed. So different from his own, the only thing they have is common is that there are just two people in the whole world who know they are there.

 

Sherlock exhales a shaky breath, one that’s echoed in the tremor of his hands. Does it hurt her because he still goes to her, or is it painful because he chooses not to stay?

 

He’s not the man he was before. Something has changed inside of him, something to do with friendship and caring and love. Something to do with Molly.

 

He aches for her. The feelings are tender and soft, but he has no name for them. He wants to protect, to care, and in turn be cared for. He wants to touch, to kiss, but he doesn’t think he should.

 

There’s a memory, one that he hides away, it’s of a kiss. A goodbye. _I hope you’ll be very happy, Molly Hooper._

 

If you love a thing you let it go, isn’t that what they say? Well, he’s been trying to let her go for years, but the pain is still there, locked away in his cold chest, safely hidden.

 

She’ll never know how he feels for her.

 

It’s for the best.

 

oOo

“What I don’t understand is why you made her say it.”

 

“What do you mean, _‘Why’_?” Sherlock asks Ella, angered and confused by the stupidity of her question. “Her life was being threatened by my psychopathic sister. She would have died!”

 

“But there was no evidence to suggest that she’d survive the game whether you forced her to play or not. You told me,” his therapist flicks through her notes, “that five people had already died. Whether they or you, John or Mycroft played along, won or lost, everybody who’d been used as a subject in her experiment up to that point had died. Yes?”

 

Reluctantly: “Yes.”

 

“A logical conclusion must have been that Molly was going to die anyway.”

 

The icy glare he pins her with is taken by the woman as affirmation that she's on to something.

 

“And knowing that, believing that she would die, why would you cause her unnecessary distress if none of it mattered anyway?”

 

“I-” he huffs in frustration. She has him on the ropes, and he knows it. 

 

“Is it possible,” she perseveres, “despite what you think in retrospect, that at that moment you thought she _would_ in fact die, and that you made her do it because you wanted to hear her say those words to you before she was gone forever? So that you could carry the memory of those words, spoken in her voice, with you after she was dead?”

 

Minutes pass. This time Ella holds her nerve, lets him be the one to speak first.

 

The tense silence is followed by a quiet, “Yes. It’s possible.”

 

Ella slumps back into her chair. She takes that as a win.

 

oOo

Half shrouded in darkness, he pretends to sleep. When she begins to gently etch a line over his scapula he visualises it.

 

The first symbol is easy, a line, or perhaps the letter _I_. The second line begins the same way but veers off into curves and sharp dips. In his mind’s eye, he recreates her touch, the picture slowly revealing her words. By the time her finger lifts to begin the third word it’s becoming harder for him to breathe and tears roll silently down his cheeks.

oOo

He has no idea what to do, so he stays away. In his two years of living death he never felt this far from home. Being without her makes him miserable and lonely, but he knows how wrong it would be to encourage her feelings when he can’t make sense of his own.

 

The longing to weave a weary path to her arms and bury himself there is more than he can take sometimes. Without her eyes to look at him, he feels that he’s slowly vanishing from view, without her, without her touch to ground him that his very being will scatter to the winds and drift away. Yet he can’t trust himself, and he knows that she shouldn’t either. The thought makes him feel broken and chaotic.

 

He takes a deep breath and tries to keep himself from falling apart.

 

At times like these, he knows exactly how to take the edge off the uncontrollable sentiments that course through his veins. But his usual substitute is soured by a movie reel of images that play in his head, of tears welling in her disappointed eyes. So, instead, he finds himself unlocking her door and stripping away his clothes as he makes his way through the darkness in an imitation of the first night she’d touched him weeks ago.

 

She’s asleep but stirs when he lifts the covers and slips in beside her.

 

“Sherlock?” she asks in a drowsy voice. The bed dips as she turns toward him.

 

“Go back to sleep,” he tells her. Melancholic and tired, he doesn’t have the strength to think about what he’s doing or why he’s doing it.

 

When she reaches out to touch him, he grabs her wrist. “Stop,” he pleads, pressure building behind his already stinging eyes, “just – just stop this.”

 

Time stands still.

 

In the darkness he holds onto her, afraid to let go. Words won’t come, and he knows that she’s becoming frightened by the way he grips her too tightly.

 

They’re both breathing hard. She's every bit as terrified as he is, and he wants to look away from her but can’t.

 

The words he knows he should speak – either a confession that he feels the same way, or a warning to her that he doesn’t – they won’t come. Useless and frustrated, the absence of articulation makes his heart ache.

 

Beneath his fingertips, Sherlock feels her pulse quicken, sees her eyes glisten in the moonlight that casts shadows around her bedroom from beneath the curtains, hears her breathing become heavy with un shed tears. And God help him, he just can’t contain it anymore.

 

Something in the air between them shifts. It washes over him like a beautiful hurricane.

 

Molly’s eyes become heavy lidded, soft. Her entire body shudders. She yields, and he pins her pliant body to the bed beneath his own.

 

“Molly,” he says, because it’s the only word in the world that matters.

 

She is sleep-warm and soft. Her eyelids flutter gently closed, and she sighs a voiceless breath: it ghosts like a humid summer breeze over his parted lips.

 

He abandons his words as they’ve abandoned him. Instead he tastes her lips, and when she gasps he slips his tongue into her mouth, stealing her breath away.

 

Kissing her is gentler than he’s ever imagined. She returns his exhausted relief with open-heartedness. In his fantasies, they’re excited, eager to get on with it. The reality is he’s unsure what to do or even if he’s allowed to do it, and she’s trying to make every touch, every brush of lips last as long as she can. It’s a strange sensation of shame and arousal blended, his thickening flesh lying heavily between them, and he knows she can’t be in any doubt about what he wants to do with her. The embarrassment is mercifully short lived, pushed away by the intensity of his craving and the acceptance in her every touch. When the fingers that have tangled in his bed mussed curls leave to remove the nightdress that his hands have already slid beneath, he abdicates all control.

 

He wants her. He wants her so badly. But the palms of her hands press flat against his chest as though to push him away.

 

They both still.

 

“Do you want me to stop?” he asks, knowing that he’ll shatter to pieces if she doesn’t want this too.

 

There’s affirmation in the near desperate press of lips, and the knot in his belly loosens a bit.

 

“No. God, no.”

 

They kiss the way old lovers do. Somehow knowing every move and counter move the other will make, they exist in a state of perfect harmony. Molly’s skin blushes, _glows_ , where he kisses her: throat, collarbones, breasts. Her lips. He wants to linger there forever in her soft mouth and inconceivably softer kisses, but insistent biology – hers and his both – won’t wait.

 

Clutching and pulling, his own clothing is hastily cast aside. There’s a snap-rip of cotton, as he pulls her underwear from her body.

 

Each time she moves, pleasure flares hotly through him. Even though the sensation is greatest where their bodies meet, he’s hypersensitive to every breath that grazes his skin or every brush of cotton bed sheet. His thrusts against her body are desperate and demanding, lacking in finesse. The satisfied moans that she makes tells him that she doesn’t mind. Hips rolling, Molly arches into his touch like a wild flower seeking the sun. Above her, Sherlock shifts their bodies into alignment. Hard and wanting, he presses against her wet and eager heat. Arms and legs wrap around each other, they rock desperately, Molly gasping high and harsh.

 

When he sucks her skin, she tastes like honey. When he breathes her in, she smells like the sea. Bare skin presses to bare skin, and it’s almost enough to undo him. So when she takes him inside he loses himself completely. It leaves him light-headed, because he _just…can’t... breathe_ when his body is surrounded by hers, and the small sounds that she makes suck the very air from his lungs. Pin pricks of fireworks ignite behind his closed lids.

 

He is sheathed inside her body, her tongue licks into his mouth. It’s exhilarating. He lets himself say her name again, because no other word exists that could possibly convey how he feels. Beneath him, Molly moans and bites her lip to stifle the needy sounds she makes. But Sherlock wants to hear everything, so he pushes deeper. In his ear, she breathes, “Fuck. Yes,” and kisses him fiercely.

 

To their love-making, they bring every unsaid word, every feeling, every frustration that has plagued them for so long. They’re both so full of pent up tension, like incendiary devices waiting for the spark that will set them off, that it doesn’t take Sherlock a full minute to gasp out his completion, Molly even less. 

 

Then it’s quiet. Too quiet.

 

In the aftermath of the storm, there’s a rough exhalation of breath and she cries. Turning away from him to hide her tears, angry at herself, not only for this, but for all the things she’s given.

 

He doesn’t know if something has mended between them or is irreparably broken.

 

Helpless and feeling like a failure, he lies beside her, not knowing what to do. He fights the instinct to say he’s sorry, because he’s not. Not for this. Searching for courage, he curls up against her and holds her oh so fragile trembling body to his. Emotional intelligence is not his strong suit but even he can figure out that Molly’s crying because she thinks what just happened means nothing to him, when in fact it means _everything_.

 

With no idea of what else to do, feeling desperate to make her understand, Sherlock takes her hand, strokes her back, and with one fingertip begins to write.

 

Breathing raggedly, she asks, “What are you doing?”

 

She tries to turn to look at him, but he holds her steady, his long limbs cradle her smaller figure against his own. Sweeping silken strands of auburn hair away from the delicate curve of her damp cheek, he brushes the back of his finger over her temple: she is so heartbreakingly lovely in the muted moonlight.

 

His lips brush the pink shell of her ear. Pain, affection, emotions that he’s not equipped to deal with, surge against his breastbone. “I- I can’t do this if you look at me,” he chokes on the words, said in little more than a whisper. “But I’m trying to tell you- to ask you, please, give me time. Please? I need you to help me, to teach me. If you can find it in your heart to wait, I promise you Molly, I’ll get to where you are.”

 

His nose buried in her hair, his arms tighten around her. Tenderly kissing the feminine and graceful line of her neck, he waits. 

 

“How do you know?” she asks quietly after a moment or two. “How can you be so sure?”

 

“Because,” he says, breath shuddering, “you’ve taught me already, Molly Hooper, that love will conquer all.”


End file.
